In lighter news, this Thursday, August 17, 2017 (10:32 am) is the date of the Shadowrun universe’s Great Ghost Dance, the massive surprise attack deciding the race war that finally brought down the United States and ushered in the cyberpunk dystopia!
So I just remembered that at one point, long ago, Shadowrun tried to call its internet-wizards ‘Otaku’, which is pretty hilariously naive in retrospect.
But it also makes me think of how incredible/dumb it would be to have actual hard-bitten otaku mercenaries in the dark cyberpunk future, stealing hyperanime from Japanese corporate servers locked down with murderous IC.
“Listen, chummer, you weren’t there for the waifu wars of 2036, so don’t you even dare tell me Honoka isn’t the best girl!” The servos in his arm whine as he clutches the weathered body pillow tighter.
Somewhere in there, beyond the neon expanse of the Tokyo matrix hub, beyond the towering megaliths of corporate datastructures, beyond walls of shimmering ice and swarms of hunter-killer subroutines, there she was. Hatsune Miku. The rogue AI. They said she owned the World Bank, now.
Been playing the new Shadowrun game. They’re right, the Dragonfall DLC campaign is a lot better. Better writing, feels truer to the feel and the mythology (where Dead Man’s Switch seemed more generically cyberpunk slash SNES-Shadowrun [which I loved and still own on cartridge]). Also the mission flow and NPC personalities feel a lot closer to the old Bioware classics in terms of fleshed-out-ness.
So that got me looking at the Shadowrun Wiki, because I was like “oh yeah, what did happen at Dunkelzahn’s inauguration?” and it was fun to notice how the mythology’s been updated to keep up with whatever the future looked like, like in 2005/“2064” the main BBS got replaced with a p2p system
Also that wiki had, as advertising, an autoplay news channel with geekbait anchors - busty in tight nerd-reference shirts, (actually isn’t that 3 or 4 years behind the curve now, I haven’t seen a Snorgtees ad in a while) that I think might have been the selfsame “very cyberpunk” channel I mentioned being disoriented by a while ago, so full circle I guess.
So in response to some of my recent posts, people have pointed me towards two really good stories that I want to share onwards.
First, in response to my musing on Santa Claus/Batman as the modern good/bad dual gods, pureamericanism pointed me to Nackles: A Christmas Story, which is a 1964 piece specifically about Santa Claus and a dark counterpart as modern gods, it’s always a mixed bag of glee and frustration to see someone’s already taken up your brilliant idea years before you were born.
Second, in response to my Scientology backgrounder, bloodandhedonism pointed me to The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga, an alternate history tale of Ayn Rand being inspired by L. Ron Hubbard to found a country in the Congo as Belgian rule collapses. If you don’t know much about Rand or the decolonization of Africa don’t worry, it’s written well enough that you’ll pick up most of what you need, and it was written piece by piece on a message board with inline commentary from the author and readers that’ll fill in the rest, in a manner that reminds me of the old Shadowrun sourcebooks.
Man, the Shadowrun sourcebooks were absolutely great. The system itself was kind of a mess - they used tons of D6s for everything, on I think the business principle that before the rise of gaming-specific stores in the ‘90s obscure dice would be hard for entry-level players to find but books could be gotten from bookstores and D6s from board games or anywhere. This made rolling anything a mess, and also contributed to a system where there was very little range separating a miss and a catastrophic hit. Also between decking, vehicle rigging, and astral plane stuff you too often got into a situation in which only one character could meaningfully participate.
But the sourcebooks! They were written as BBS posts interspersed with comments from a recurring gang of regulars, and the worldbuilding was great. Some of the best books didn’t even add any game mechanics but just explored the dynamics of the world - Corporate Shadowfiles was an incredibly readable introduction to corporate finance, and Dunkelzahn’s Will, which was, well, a will and testament that was basically a long list of adventure hooks, rivals it as my favorite RPG book ever.
I love stuff like that. I think the L5R RPG - also a great world, and with a better system, open-ended D10, skill/attribute::roll/keep, though I don’t know if they ever got dueling to work in a way that made sense - did some good stuff like that too. The Merchant’s Guide to Rokugan, which turned out to be an unnanounced book about the conspiratorial Kolat, for one, though that was in the period after the Clan War when the worldbuilding was sort of stumbling around in the dark tripping over its own feet for a few years.
SEALAND DOESN’T HAVE ANY MEANS OF PRODUCTION FOR US TO OWN
…a longing by bourgeois capitalists like that one PayPal guy to return to a system of production based on land scarcity - an attempt by capitalism to graft itself onto a new feudalism.
Oh yeah, re-enchanted capitalist feudalism was transparently the appeal of cyberpunk right-accelerationism. (And the associated noir demimonde which made no pretense to resistance, but I guess that’s the “enchantment” part.)
Snow Crash obviously. Shadowrun (which was amazing worldbuilding tied to a system with an awful D6 fetish that left little margin between total success and total failure) had a pretty good backstory whereby a Supreme Court decision immunizing private security forces who had defended an infectious medical waste shipment from mistaken food rioters eventually metastasized into corporate sovereignty.
The corporations left a shell of formal democracy intact because “who really wants to bother themselves with garbage collection?” Well, the Mafia for one which was an oversight, but this was also a lore in which Suddenly Elves. (Really it was all just an excuse for rule-by-keiretsu because Japan Is The Future.)
Shadowrun page from a Nintendo Magazine System preview (issue #11, August 1993). Every few months, I get to urge to play the Shadowrun SNES game on a handheld, which isn’t going to happen until series creator Jordan Weisman tracks down the rights. :o/
The screenshots shown on the left side of the page are from the Game Boy edition of Shadowrun that Beam Software created but never released. It was a sidescrolling platformer in which you played a Street Samurai — psyche, that’s actually Edd the Duck, a game based on the BBC character and released by Beam’s subsidiary Lazerbeam.
Buy: Shadowrun (SNES) See also: More Shadowrun frothing
[Via Do Go On]Holy shit, Tiny Cartridge linked to this blog! Awesome!
The SNES Shadowrun was a cool game (except wandering all the fuck over the world trying to figure out who taught Negotiate). Pen & paper Shadowrun looked kinda terrible (a lot ‘cuz of their D6 for everything fetish) but with the BBS conceit it had the best supplement books I’ve ever seen. To this day I think Corporate Shadowfiles is a perfect introduction to corporate finance.
(P.S. oh hey 1,000th post)
Back home for Christmas again, reading through my old bookshelves. This time up: Shadowrun, 2nd Edition! (Trivia: my first real post here was about Shadowrun and V:TES. There’s actually quite a few weird post pairs that share a tag in common.)
First off, I forgot how good the setting was. Now that I’ve been to the Pacific Northwest, the grunge/tribal/punk/cyber/enviro/magic mix makes even more sense. And this isn’t even one of the supplements with their witty “BBS” running commentary. (I remember one supplement that didn’t really have any new rules or material or anything, it was just a surprisingly good introduction to corporate finance with the commenters dropping jokes and plot hooks along the way.)
Second off, I never actually played the tabletop, so I’d heard stories, but looking at it now I really realize how terrible these mechanics are. Combat, magic, decking, rigging, astral stuff - all completely different systems, all of them atrocious. If you had a balanced party it must’ve been like playing four different bad games at once. Or one at a time. I think it’s the weird insistence on doing everything with d6s.
I still plan on creating a masterlist of the happycore singles and starting on the mixes/livesets, it’s just that it slows the browser something terrible to look back too far, and every time I try to clear out the tabs I already have open I end up opening more.
So, Vampire: The Masquerade vs. Shadowrun.
vs.
I submit that between these two RPGs you have the entirety of the (mid) ‘90s.
Like on the one hand goths and on the other techno-pagans, that’s obviously the '90s right there.
Like on the one hand the world keeps on going but there’re no causes to believe in. You’re one of the special ones, though, so even though your games don’t matter they’re the best games. There are special ones older than you, and other factions, but you’ll tear them down eventually. There’re unspecial ones all around, and to thrive you ultimately have to consume them, and isn’t it tragic, but I guess you’ll find a way to deal.
And on the other hand, the world has fallen apart, there’s no cause to believe in, so you keep taking corporate jobs, but use the money to buy cool badass electronics and hang out with environmentalists and street punks, that’ll bring the system down, right?
That’s less obviously the '90s right there.
